by Archer Mayor
Organizationally, it made good sense. A century ago, the river and the railroad—until both were replaced by the interstate highway system—had served the town’s industries in turn, while the town’s elite had sat above it all, enjoying the view and raking in the money. Riverfront property in most factory towns had amounted to what a delivery alleyway is now.
It helped explain why so many older communities had corrupted their most coveted modern real estate and left beautiful, peaceful rivers to be flanked by blighted, polluted shorelines.
“What do you think?” Colin asked his guest. “A waste of time?”
“Maybe,” Willy conceded. He pointed at the steel rail on the right. “I like how the broken teeth, that thingamabob, and the tracks all fit into the same frame, like they’re interconnected.”
“How?”
Kunkle kicked at a small stone with his toe. “You find stuff like this, you try to build a story around it, right? When you first saw the teeth, you thought fistfight.”
“Right,” Colin agreed.
“Has that changed?”
“Because of this?” Colin waved his hand around to include their surroundings.
“Yeah.” Willy watched him, enjoying seeing him reason his way toward clarity. If cops get a consistent kick out of anything, it’s usually in locating what they call that “aha moment.”
“You mean the owner of the teeth maybe had a hard encounter with the train?”
“Maybe,” Willy said. “That’s a little dramatic. Most encounters with trains don’t end with a few broken teeth. We’d have more evidence than just this, and probably a medical examiner. Plus, that doesn’t explain the burned metal box.”
Guyette chuckled. “I see what you mean. A passenger, then?”
“Train comes through twice a day?” Willy asked.
“Yup. Noon heading south, and just shy of six heading north.”
“And the kid found the teeth early?”
Colin was nodding, seeing where Willy was headed. “I asked her how often she checked the tracks, as part of her treasure hunt. She said she’d done a sweep the day before, after school, meaning the teeth must’ve come from the northbound train. But you think the guy fell off?” He gestured up the tracks. “It stops about an eighth of a mile farther up. It’s still moving right here. Why would he jump or get pushed so close to the platform?”
Willy pointed to the charred hunk. “Could be where that thing comes in. Anything around here that connects with it? A plant or an electronics store?”
Guyette shook his head. “Don’t even know what it is. What about getting DNA off the teeth?”
“Costs money,” Willy said. “You even bother punching a case number for this?”
Guyette pushed his lips out resignedly. “I see what you’re sayin’. It’s barely littering at this point, since we don’t have a suspect.”
He hunkered down, retrieved their burned object of interest, and roughly shoved it into his paper bag. “Another item for the Dumpster. So much for not wanting to waste your time.”
But Willy smiled and took the bag. “Not so fast. Let’s find out what that is, first.”
“Really?” Colin asked, raising his eyebrows.
“You don’t know till you know, right?”
The other man hesitated. “I guess. You give everything this close a look?”
“You’d be all by your lonesome right now if I didn’t. Not every case begins with a knife dripping blood. Plus, I’m fond of the offbeat.”
* * *
Tina Sackman had offered to discuss her concern on the phone, or set up a video call to better explain what she’d discovered, but Lester told her that he preferred a face-to-face meeting.
It was a pretty day to take a drive, something cops do to an inordinate degree in rural areas, but his other motivation was that he’d wanted to get out of the office. Watching Sammie had been increasingly distracting. He admired her stamina, trusted her judgment, and was happy to have her backing in a fight. But watching her figure out her new command role was something he wanted to avoid.
In fairness, Joe was more than the head of their small squad, which was only one of five all told, geographically sprinkled across the state. Theirs was in the southeastern corner—where Joe had spent his entire career—but it was also from where he additionally served as the field force commander for the entire VBI, just under the director. Sam had therefore been made the number two person of the organization, not just their unit.
Lester wouldn’t have touched it with the proverbial pole. Sammie, on the other hand, couldn’t have said no if her hair had been on fire.
And therein lay one of Lester’s primary concerns for her.
Not that he knew the details, but he was aware of Sam’s having endured the childhood of a Dickens novel. It had influenced her choice of careers and played a big role in her attraction to men with poor social skills. Lester thought that she’d gotten lucky with Willy, but saying that revealed how badly she’d done in the past. He’d heard a colleague crack years ago that if your arrest stats were running thin, you could always bust whomever Martens was dating at the time.
That notwithstanding—or taking it into account—he found her organized, efficient, practical, and flexible. The hallmarks of a perfect boss. He’d also known her to be sentimental, insecure, a chronic worrier during good times, and—most concerning—occasionally inclined to override her own better judgment. That, even more rarely, had led to impulsive and careless actions—moments that Willy’s influence had done little to curb.
It was seeing many of those traits in play, as she worked the phone to establish her abrupt primacy within the agency, that had driven Les from the office. He’d felt like he was seeing a comic strip’s conflicting thought balloons floating above her head.
He knew she’d get it right, but for his own peace of mind, he needed her to do the basic spadework alone. Excess insight into a boss’s makeup had never been a good thing, in his experience.
Vermont’s forensic lab was part of the state police headquarters building, in Waterbury—one of a complex of old brick structures that had once been the sprawling campus of a heavily populated insane asylum, back in the unenlightened 1890s. Conveniently for modern, government-related needs, it was centrally located, not far from the capital, and equipped with a growing number of old brick buildings that had become increasingly available as mental health philosophies modernized and the patient population plummeted. With the corresponding expansion of state bureaucracy, the campus segued very elegantly over time into an office complex, including the state police.
Until the whole thing—flat, verdant, and surrounded by the Winooski River on three sides—went underwater during a tropical storm.
Local wags used to find it suitable that what had once housed nutcases now sheltered bureaucrats, but in fact the flood devastated the town and the facility, making everyone eager and happy to see any improvements come into view.
The forensic lab had been brand new when the flood hit, and had survived it in better shape than many of its neighbors, including the structure to which it was attached, where reams of state police records had suffered in the basement, along with some important computer hardware.
Tina Sackman gave Lester a hug in the lobby, along with a slightly reproving look. “You know we could have done this electronically. We have the means.”
“I know, I know,” he answered. “None of which would have given me the pleasure of seeing you in person.”
She patted his chest before turning toward the lab’s inner entrance, waving her key card at the lock. “Oh, you smoothie. I’m the one who called you. You don’t have to sweet-talk me into anything.”
He fell into line behind her, looking around at the building’s surprising modernity—not something he got to enjoy much in the context of Vermont’s chronically tight budgets. “I am cut to the bone, Tina.”
She waved her hand at him without turning back. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll recover.
How’s the family?”
“Sue’s still at the hospital, happily cursing the system and everyone running it; Wendy’s turned into a frighteningly attractive young woman with a growing interest in boys; and Dave’s learning the ropes at the sheriff’s office and loving it. You and Brad ought to travel across the mountains for a visit.”
She led him down a long corridor, up a flight of stairs, and eventually to her office overlooking the parking lot. On a small conference table against the wall was a row of files, neatly arranged. Two chairs had been placed side by side, facing it.
Tina indicated his seat as she settled into the other. “How familiar are you with the Paine versus Kennedy case?”
He arranged his long legs comfortably under the table. “Trooper Ryan Paine pulled over Kyle Kennedy late one night about three years ago, more or less, somewhere between Guilford and Halifax, presumably for a routine car stop. They exchanged shots and both died of their wounds. The police academy’s been stressing officer safety issues to recruits ever since. That about right? Not that I don’t know you’re about to reeducate me.”
“No, no,” she corrected him quickly. “I’m just here to show you what I found. You’re the investigator. I don’t even know if there’s enough here for you to investigate.”
She reached out for one of the folders and opened it. “You weren’t wrong in your recollection, of course. It was front-page news. But obviously there were many more details supporting the story.”
“I knew a prosecutor once,” Lester responded, “who warned me that the word ‘story’ applied only to make-believe, and never to use it on the stand.”
Tina reacted indirectly. “Well, let’s find out, because even at the time, there were questions about the actual sequence of events.”
“Oh? That doesn’t sound good.”
“Yeah. That’s why I emailed you.” She was spreading pages and photographs around in a semicircle before him as she spoke. “With no one left alive, there was a small contest between the ‘what you see is what you got’ people and others who thought the reality might be a little trickier. But the second group had no evidence to back them up.”
She suddenly sat back and fixed Lester with a look. “Is it true what I heard about Beverly Hillstrom and your boss?”
He laughed at the non sequitur. “That they’re a couple? Yeah.”
She nodded approvingly. “Good for them. Then you won’t be surprised to hear she was one of the … if not doubters, then at least questioners. If I remember, that was true of Gunther, too, but it wasn’t his case.”
“Huh,” Lester grunted, not having retained many of the details. While technically, the investigation should have gone to the VBI, it didn’t. Politics had intervened, and the state police kept control of it.
“What was the hang-up?” he asked.
“Hillstrom stuck to her specialty, of course, so for her, it was about the bullet wounds. She wasn’t emphatic either way—we would’ve heard about that—but she wasn’t happy with the foregone conclusion that Paine could have survived long enough to shoot Kennedy. Although that’s what everybody went with, finally, mostly for political reasons.”
“It wasn’t legit?”
“It was as legit as any other scenario,” she emphasized. “That’s what I’m saying, or trying to. This whole thing may not’ve been as cut-and-dried as they made out in the press releases, but nobody compromised their integrity. In the end, everyone agreed to the playbook you just rattled off: boy stops boy; boys shoot each other; one boy’s buried as a hero; the other’s forever labeled a cop-killer.”
“So where do the politics come in?”
“You know how these things get. Everybody leaning on everybody else to get results fast. The primary investigators on the case were pretty quick to stand before the media and say, ‘case closed.’ But in their defense, nobody’s proved them wrong, either, so no miss, no foul.”
“Until now,” he prompted her.
She smiled. “You keep trying to corner me on that. I’m just bringing you … Call it an after-the-fact anomaly.”
“All right, all right. Tell me about your anomaly.”
She reached for another file. “Only part of what I’m about to tell you played a role in the initial case findings. It involves DNA and fingerprints, after all, which—then as now—can take a while to come back. And in this particular situation, since things were moving along at such a clip, everyone had moved on by then. Not only that, but the lab’s findings didn’t debunk anything, so all was considered safe and sound.”
She opened the file and laid out a series of fingerprint images. “Fitting what was found at the scene, there were two weapons—one for each man, and each with one round fired. Ballistics did their thing and the facts lined up perfectly. As part of that same routine, each of the guns was tested for prints. Again, as you can see here, nothing but consistency—each man’s prints were where they were supposed to be. No muss, no fuss. So far, so good.”
“You do know how to build things up,” Lester commented.
“Hey. Allow me a little fun. Okay, now, I’m assuming you’ve been in a situation like this before, right? Lifting prints for comparison?”
“Sure.”
“And on those occasions, what did you do with the print or prints you lifted?”
He glanced at her, looking for the trap. “Sent them to the lab?”
“Right. Who then plugged them into AFIS to see what kicked out.”
“That and the state’s database,” he reminded her.
“Correct,” she agreed. “But in either case, the hope’s always that the person’s prints will be on file, and you’d all end up exchanging high fives.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously, wondering where this was heading.
She twisted in her chair to face him before asking, “But successful or not, did you ever—in a situation where you had several prints—compare the lifted prints with each other?”
He hesitated before asking, “Why would I?”
She didn’t answer the question, asking instead, “And, if you got lucky and did get a hit, did you then push to have a DNA analysis done of the print, to double-check that the latent matched the person’s genetic code—assuming they also were on record?”
He shook his head. “Why would I do that? A match is a match.”
“That’s what I would have thought,” Tina said. “It’s what we all would’ve thought. It’s cumbersome, expensive, and redundant.”
She opened a file to show two shots of the same enlarged image of a single fingerprint.
“What’s that show you?”
Playing along, he studied them closely before stating, “Same picture, times two. One’s got a bit less showing at the edge there.” He tapped the image. “But you can tell they’re the same print. Like a Xerox.”
She covered them with an evidence report. “And yet one was collected from Kennedy’s trigger, while the other came off the revolver’s cylinder.”
Lester shoved aside the report to look again at the prints. “Weird. They’re almost exactly the same.”
Tina sat back, beaming with pride. “They are exactly the same.”
Lester was nonplussed. “What’re you saying? Aren’t they Kyle Kennedy’s?”
“Yes, but they aren’t separate prints. They’re duplicates, and since every lifted print is compared to what’s in the data bank, and not to the other prints in any given collection, no one tumbled to it.”
“That they were manufactured?” he asked incredulously.
“In this situation, I think people in the latents field use the term ‘forged.’ But, yes.”
She slid over a textbook and opened it to a marked page. “See here? This is a display of an individual’s thumbprints, lifted from the same drinking glass, five different times. Each one shares the same characteristics, as you’d expect, and each resulted with a hit from AFIS, proving they were valid. But compared to each other, you can see that they’re all a little diffe
rent. This one’s very slightly smudged, this one’s lighter, this one had more pressure behind it, this one emphasizes the heel more than this other one.… It’s the nature of the beast. It’s essentially impossible to leave exactly the same impression behind, twice in a row. If you really work at it hard, the differences can be subtle, but you can always tell.”
She pulled out another picture of a print from the Paine–Kennedy case. “This one was lifted from a bullet casing—a round surface.”
He stared at it. “It’s not the same print, but it looks good.”
“Too good,” she said, “less consistent with touching and more with being planted there. It’s the same with all of them, although only the two I showed you first were identical. The others belong to different fingers, all fitting the same man, like you’d expect.” She added, “And here’s the kicker. I did run DNA on all of them, on my own, since that’s my thing, just to see what I’d find.”
“And?”
“There was none. On any of them. Each one was pristine. They weren’t the result of a real finger touching anything. They were placed there using some sort of transfer technique I can only imagine, given the ubiquity of computers and fancy printers.”
“But transferred from what?” he asked.
“Beats me,” she replied. “Something else he’d touched earlier? A computer file featuring his prints? An old fingerprint card? I can’t tell you.”
“All to make it look like Kennedy had handled a gun he’d never touched.”
“Maybe,” she stressed, laying a cautioning hand on his forearm. “That’s where you have to be super careful. Scientifically speaking, there’s nothing saying he never handled the gun—only that he didn’t leave those impressions in the traditional manner.”
Lester got up and began pacing the room, his chin tucked in. “You’re tiptoeing toward saying this case is baloney,” he said.
